Managing Team Foundation Work Items

Team Foundation uses work items to help you manage the work that must be finished in a product life cycle. Different work item types track different types of work, such as customer requirements, product bugs, and development tasks. Team Foundation allows you to customize the work item types that are available in your team project to allow you to track your work in the way it makes sense for your development environment.

If you are looking for information about a particular work item type, see the process guidance for your team project. For more information, see Finding and Using Process Guidance.

Managing Work Items

All projects have "To Do" lists, and everyone on your team can be assigned various tasks over the course of your project. Some people are assigned specifications to write, others are assigned code to implement and then bugs to fix, and others are assigned tests to run. The work item database on your Team Foundation Server tracks these different types of work items. To track the progress of your project, each work item is assigned to a person on your project team. However, work items can be passed around to different people on your team according to the project work flow. Each type of work item has a customized form and work flow. The administrators of your project can add new types and modify the ones that you are already using.

The current state of the work item and its progress is tracked on the work item form. The work item form has fields, states, and transitions that are relevant to the type of work item, and affect how you use those work items to track your work.

The work items available in your team project depend on the methodology it uses. For more information about the specific work item types in your team project and their use, see the process guidance for your team project.

You find and manage your work items using work item queries. The Team Foundation query builder allows you to build simple or complex queries to pinpoint the information that you need. When you run a query, the work items matching that query are shown in the results list.

The query builder and query results can be displayed in different ways. For more information, see Query View and Results View.

In This Section

• Adding and Editing Work Items
  Lists topics for adding and editing work items in Team Foundation.

• Querying for Work Items
  Lists topics for creating and running queries to find work items.

See Also

Tasks

How to: Find and Edit Work Items Assigned to You
How to: Go To Specific Work Items